With less than a month away from the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania—the official start of phase five in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—star Jonathan Majors is opening up about his role as Kang the Conqueror, the next gargantuan-level, multi-variant supervillain.
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Speaking with Deadline during an interview at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival for his new film Magazine Dreams, Majors expounded on the real-life and fictional figures that helped him bring the Kang to life:
“Inspirations for Kang: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar. Start there. Counterpoints, which is also important in creating character is to figure out how does he encounter people. You’re smart, watch out how smart I am. You can look at Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, that’s the superhero of superheroes, etcetera. In order to be the super villains of super villains, how do I counter-act that in the zeitgeist?”
Additionally, in an interview with Collider at Sundance, Majors likened his experience jumping into the MCU to doing theater, specifically touching on the hopeful expectation that audiences come to see the hard work he and his fellow collaborators put in.
“Think about theater, right? You do a play, you have no idea if someone’s coming to that show, you worked your ass off, [but] you have no idea,” Majors explained. “The tickets don’t really matter, you already checked into a different ecosystem, you know? You’re hoping people are gonna come see the work you’ve done in that space, in that black box, for that long, right? You’re hoping it’s gonna happen. With the MCU, and with Kang, there is such a beautiful sensation knowing that the work that myself and my collaborators do is going to reach people. That responsibility is something I honor and something I really take on.”
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania hits theaters Friday, Feb. 17.
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